Zomia

At the turn of the twentieth century, the French colonial administration adopted various strategies and tactics to 'pacify' and control the culturally heterogeneous regions dividing the lowland realms of the Lao and Vietnamese courts, while upland powerbrokers aimed to forge strategic alliances with the new colonial power. This article takes the concept of mimesis as a means to explore the interplay of alterity and identity. With reference to the work of Michael Taussig, along with other theories of imitation, I will discuss processes of mutual appropriation and differentiation within the precarious relationship between colonizers and colonized. Mimesis here provides an alternative reading of upland Southeast Asian history beyond the binaries of dominance and resistance prevalent in James C. Scott's recent work on the anarchist history of zomia.

This article investigates cultural dynamics on the northeast Tibetan Plateau with a case study of the Mangghuer people of the Sanchuan (Three Valleys) Region of Minhe Hui and Tu  Autonomous County (Qinghai Province, China). I focus on ‘models of spatialisation’—the ways in which the physical landscape is perceived, conceptualised and made meaningful. In the Mangghuer context, such models basically construe the landscape as being enlivened by flows and accumulations of positive and negative energies or entities. After providing a detailed description of this model, I attempt to locate it within a wider comparative framework of three broad models of spatialisation employed on the Tibetan Plateau: geomantic; mandalic; and itinerant. Based on this examination, I argue that the cultural dynamics of the region are not based on ethnic distinctions, but rather on the transportation of models across ethnic and other boundaries.

Several recent works in political theory argue that exit, rather than being a coward's choice, is a potent mode of resistance that is particularly well suited to the current political era. These works reclaim exit, seeing it as a method of political opposition. While innovative and illuminating, these accounts are limited because they tend to treat all exits as resistance, regardless of context or content, and they are inclined to over-saturate exit with oppositional political meaning. I argue that resistant exit should be more narrowly defined. By examining a range of empirical cases, I identify and explore three distinctive characteristics of this particular type of opposition. In addition to clarifying a recently developed idea in current scholarship, this article provides a systematic way for scholars to understand and interpret the intersection between resistance and exit.

Drawing on various ethnographic case studies from upland Southeast Asia, this special issue explores uplanders’ pioneering agency and challenges the stereotype of the remote and marginal uplander. We consider upland areas as dynamic sites of future-making and change – initiated by pioneering individuals or local elites who seek out and explore different potential sources of (economic and spiritual) potency. By using the figure of the pioneer as heuristic device, we realign our ethnographic gaze on uplanders by giving particular emphasis to: (1) agents of sociopolitical dynamics in Zomia, (2) questions of remoteness and pioneering mobility, (3) old and new sources of potency, from ‘the state’ to the religious domain, (4) aspirations and future-making and (5) pioneers of change and emergent elites.

This essay argues that imperial Vietnamese officials produced legible subjects through the genre of imperial ethnography in the decades before French colonial rule in northern Vietnam. Focusing on one official working in the Northwest, it connects Vietnamese imperial ethnography both to the rationalising administrative reforms of the early nineteenth century and to the scholarly discussion about modern empires and ethnography.

When the French finally seized control of the Lao territories on the east bank of the Mekong from the Siamese in 1893, Houaphan became an internal upland frontier region within colonial Indochina. Unfamiliar with the concept of overlapping spheres of sovereignty—during the nineteenth century, Houaphan paid tribute to both Luang Prabang and Hué—members of the French colonial administration held discordant views on whether to attach Houaphan to either Laos or Annam. In 1896, the Gouverneur Général in Hanoi decided to divide Houaphan between the two protectorates. This administrative decision triggered unforeseen consequences such as large-scale migrations of the Lao population from east to west. Only seven years later, Houaphan was united again as a province of Laos. This paper explores the social, political and cultural dynamics of this ethnically heterogeneous upland region with regard to specific colonial administrative practices.

Since the 1990s, several ‘special zones’ have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an analysis of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, in northern Laos, this paper argues that it is precisely through the ambiguous presence of the state that these spaces manage to maintain a unique level of autonomy. Moving from James Scott's famous discussion of highland communities in Southeast Asia, I term this Zomia 2.0: a modern attempt to keep the state out at the edges of Asia's greatest power, characterised as much by political remoteness as by neoliberal connectivity.

State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstitution of the local history of an upland region of Laos – Sepon – reveals a process of state formation from a territorial margin. Contrary to James C. Scott’s thesis on state-evading peoples, members of a local ethnic minority population – the Phuthai – have been part of the making of the state over centuries. In addition to the material aspects of state-making, this article explores its intangible components that are often neglected in analyses of state formation. This wider lens is particularly applied to the Communist state making efforts in Sepon during the American- Vietnam War. These have had the unintended consequence of producing a new class that replicates age-old social hierarchies and have resulted in Sepon, and probably other upland areas of contemporary Laos, being more socially inequitable than the Communist Revolution intended.

Click on this link to have free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cJjfKpyneKKxnQQUDj7q/full

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.

Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/across-zomia-with-merchants-monks-and-musk-process-geographies-trade-networks-and-the-innereastsoutheast-asian-borderlands/CA46E0EAD462C666C0F0AA460110ACCF


For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.

The culturally heterogeneous uplands of Southeast Asia constitute a zone of encounters and relations across cultural difference. The Introduction to this Special Issue lays out key themes that encompass the questions addressed by the individual essays. Moreover, it discusses concepts—such as frontier and friction—that inform some of the case studies presented in this issue. The combination of historical and anthropological approaches is aimed at exploring the complex social, political and cultural configurations in upland Southeast Asia.

On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote north-eastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers came out of their bed and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster’s shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this paper explores how it participated in another reconfiguration — that of Assam’s place within India’s political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India’s remote ‘north-east frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallisation of Assam’s image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature, and more importantly incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre-state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the re-ordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India’s national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.

This commentary explores the implications of identifying an Antipodean economic geography distinct from an apparent Ango-American hegemony. I explore Wray et al’s proposal that there is a different kind of ‘edginess’ to the work produced by those on the underside of the world. Using an example from fieldwork in the highlands of northern Thailand I suggest that identifying with perspectives of the so-called periphery, and striving to see those perspectives as, in fact, central is a crucial part of critical knowledge production.

Thailand’s near-total elimination of opium poppy cultivation is attributed to “alternative development” programming, which replaces illicit crops with licit ones. However, opium poppy cultivation was not drastically reduced because substitute crops earned the same income as opium: nothing can equal the price of opium to smallholder farmers, especially those without land tenure. Thailand’s reduction in poppy cultivation was achieved by the increased presence and surveillance capability of state security actors, who, year by year, were able to locate and destroy fields, and arrest cultivators, with increasing accuracy. This coercion was also accompanied by benefits to cultivators, including the provision of health and education services and the extension of roads; both stick and carrot constituted the encroachment of the Thai state. The provision of citizenship to hill tribe members also gave them a vested interest in the state, through their ability to hold land, access health care, education and work opportunities, amongst others. These initiatives did not occur without costs to hill tribe cultures for whom a symbiotic relationship with the land was and remains disrupted. These findings indicate that alternative development programming unlinked to broader state-building initiatives in Afghanistan, Myanmar and other opium poppy-producing areas will fail, because short-term, high-yield, high value, imperishable opium will remain the most logical choice for poor farmers, especially given the lack of a farmer’s vested interest in the state which compels them to reduce their income whilst offering them no other protections or services.

This paper, based on primary sources, addresses the early anarchist ethnography of Élie Reclus (brother of the more famous French geographer Élisée Reclus), placing it in the context of anarchist geographers’ elaboration of the theory of mutual aid, as well as in the construction of a scientific discourse opposed to racism, colonialism and Eurocentrism recently addressed by international literature on this group. Drawing on the double critical frame of present-day anarchist anthropologies and cultural geographies addressing the debates on otherness, postcolonialism and differences, this paper analyses an early but radical attempt to build a scientific discourse on empathy and understanding of different cultural standpoints in the political context of an explicit denunciation of colonial crimes by all nations of European culture, as well as scientists’ complicity therein. I argue that European science at the time of imperialism and evolutionism was not a homogeneous field, but a battlefield where heterodox and nonconformist thinkers tried to develop different discourses in order to build cultures of solidarity linked to a consistent political action.   

Keywords: Reclus brothers; Anarchist geographies; Anarchist anthropologies; Anti-colonialism; Otherness

This paper probes the mechanism of present-day periodic markets and how they operate through a detailed case study of periodic markets frequented by different ethnic groups in Jinping county, Yunnan, China. It sets out to identify the defining characteristics of periodic markets and considers the question of why they arise and why they continue to survive today. Past research has demonstrated that a key feature of periodic markets in traditional China was their accessibility and the freedom that they afforded local residents in buying and selling commodities. Fieldwork confirms that six-day-cycle markets, based on the 12-day Chinese zodiac, in Jinping county do give producers of all ethnicities the freedom to sell their produce, but also points out that the market environment encourages the spontaneous specialization of production skills and provides an important place for social interaction and expression of the local cultures.

Opium poppy cultivation in Thailand fell from 12,112 hectares in 1961 to 281 ha in 2015. One outlier exists: Chiang Mai province's remote southwestern district, Omkoi. 90% of the district is a national forest reserve where human habitation is illegal. However, an ethnic Karen population has lived there since long before the law that outlawed them was created, unconnected to the state by road, with limited or no access to health, education and other services: they cultivate the majority of Thailand's known opium poppy, because they have little other choice. They increasingly rely on cash-based markets, their lack of citizenship precludes them from land tenure which might incentivize them to grow alternate crops, and their statelessness precludes them from services and protections. Nor is the Thai state the singular Leviathan that states are often assumed to be; it is a collection of networks with divergent interests, of whom one of the most powerful, the Royal Forestry Department, has purposely made Omkoi's population illegible to the state, and has consistently blocked the attempts of other state actors to complexify this state space beyond the simplicity of its forest. These factors make short-term, high-yield, high value, imperishable opium the most logical economic choice for poor Karen farmers residing in this "non-state" space.

In mainland Southeast Asia, the center-periphery relation structures both upland and lowland socialities and provides a background on which current ideas of indigeneity unfold. This relation is articulated in rituals, in the structure of settlements, and in myths and other cultural representations. However, there has been little attempt to compare types of center and periphery Relations between ethnicities. This article proposes such a comparison between the Rmeet of Laos and the Yao/Iu Mien, an ethnicity that has migrated from southern China across Laos to Thailand. It proposes that at least two types of
center-periphery relation can be found among these groups, one characterized by continuity and replication, the other by contrast and boundary maintenance. It also proposes that besides the dominant method of articulating center and periphery in each society, subordinate models exist. This comparison is enabled by a synthetic series of theoretical models that structure analytical terms.

O texto apresenta e contextualiza o texto traduzido para o português, "Geografias do Saber, Geografias da Ignorância: saltando escalas no Sudeste Asiático", que incorpora uma abordagem macroscópica e original, desafiando a formação e os pressupostos dos "estudos de área” e também dos "estudos asiáticos": o primeiro, uma tradição universitária anglo-americana com pouca penetração na academia brasileira; e o segundo, um campo de especialização regional que apenas mais recentemente passou a ganhar maior espaço nos cursos de ciências sociais e humanas e nos programas de pesquisa latino-americanos, mas que ainda recebe pouquíssima atenção nas revistas e nos departamentos brasileiros de geografia. Particular atenção é dada ao Sudeste Asiático como uma área de estudo, considerando sua construção, seus limites e suas escalas. Mas qual poderia ser o interesse do público brasileiro numa região geograficamente tão distante e distinta? Quais debates acadêmicos foram suscitados a partir do artigo traduzido? E, afinal, o que são os area studies e qual sua relação com a geografia? Nesta introdução busco responder estas três questões.

This chapter addresses the mobility and migrations of the Lisu, an ethnicity in Southeast Asia who may or may not constitute a single social group with a single set of "origins".  It traces back the movements that scattered Lisu households and villages over a broad area from Yunnan in the east to India in the west, from northern Myanmar to Thailand and Laos.  Lisu migrations occupy the fringes of other stories, those of the British and Chinese empires, of colonization, Christianity and Communism.  In light of their history, the chapter reconsiders Scott and van Schendel's idea of "Zomia" as a paradigm of cultural history.

The historiography of the nineteenth century Panjab privileges the core constituency of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 'empire', whereby the margins are represented only as conquered territories. This article shifts the perspective by highlighting the context of 'Zomian' margins in the making of an 'empire'. Based on coeval travellers' accounts, news from Lahore Durbar and British Indian governmental sources, the focus is on the impact of economic and political contingencies on the policies of Sikh Sardars, the Maharaja of Lahore and, ultimately, the British Indian government in the Western Himalayan region. We shall, however, limit ourselves to economic interaction between the hegemonic empire and Kangra hill states to bring out the dynamics of dominance and subversion. The underlying assumption of dominance and eventual integration into the 'empire' was rather economic: in services, materials and money. It was, however, not a relationship of political dominance only. While the subjugation of hill states alienated revenue to the 'empire', it also opened new markets to the hill products and services that had cultural and economic implications. The new markets were welcomed; the alienation of revenue was not. The alliance, therefore, had an uneasy aspect, nuanced by a subtle protest, that of the weak against the strong: an indirect, meek and symbolic resistance. Consequently, when the strength of 'empire' dwindled, such protests acquired accentuated dimensions. The process of such protests is vital in understanding the decline of Lahore 'empire', barely a decade after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

The Kham cultural region is situated in the transitional zone between the Sichuan basin and the Tibetan plateau and has an immense vertical range of over two miles. Most of this region was slated to become a new province of the Republic of China by the name of Xikang in 1939 pending the establishment there of modern government institutions. The project of establishing Xikang was approached largely through the practice of tunken, a form of land reclamation that assimilated the natural environment to national standards of agriculture and simultaneously facilitated multiple strategies of cultural assimilation. At very high altitudes this technology was impractical, and social control was far more difficult for Xikang administrators. The Zomia studies model introduced by James C. Scott addresses this type of highland scenario, arguing that the inability of grain-based states to overcome geographical obstacles resulted in the existence of “nonstate spaces” occupied largely by refuge-seeking nomads. In my analysis, the state-resistant spaces of twentieth-century Kham were not merely occupied by nomads, but were actively produced through the practice of yak transhumance, a nomadic adaptation to the local environment developed over centuries. Nomads were not merely refugees from the state, but counteracted it through a complex socio-technical system in which the production of food and the production of social space were intertwined.

This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding
its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter
highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an
ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated
world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors,
it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins
between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place.
Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality,
and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological
forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change,
reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different
ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region,
including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.

Keywords: Trans-Himalayas, Zomia, livelihood, horizontal connectivity,
multistate margins

Across the uplands of Northeast India, sedentary forms of agriculture are gradually replacing shifting cultivation. In the process, land holdings are becoming “privatized.” As commonly held land becomes inaccessible or dis- appears, and mechanisms that formerly called for the redistribution of wealth transform, social inequality increases. The location of the Garo Hills at the border with Bangladesh renders the area a peripheral borderland, in which the Indian state exerts its presence. In his historical analysis of upland societies of the Zomia massif, James Scott (2009) emphasizes how the modern state strives to control and “make taxable” all of its subjects. For Tania Murray Li (2014), the development of neoliberal markets is the primary driver of change, as she shows based on long-term research in rural Central Sulawesi (Indone- sia). While the effects of both these transformative forces can be clearly felt, in the Garo Hills the ongoing dissolution of communally managed land and the creation of privately owned plots is nonetheless held in check by the persistent social obligation to maintain at least a certain degree of communal sharing.

Humans and elephants have historically shared the forested mountain ranges of Zomia, a geography defined by the regular movement of people and an ecology shaped by the movement of its elephant population. This paper will examine how elephant pathways facilitated human mobility in the highlands defining the Indo-Myanmar border. It will analyze the more-than-human agency that emerges when following elephant trails and the varying role this forest infrastructure might have played in the social and political history of the region via two historical examples. First, the migration of a Lisu community in Upper Myanmar who utilized elephant paths to navigate their passage. Second, how the British empire exploited a network of elephant-human tracks to subjugate the peoples living in Mizoram, northeast India. In these regions the patterns of migration, history of colonization, and identities and practices of communities must be understood in relation to wild elephants

[ Abstract ] How might historians secure for the river a larger berth in the recent macro-historical turn? This question cannot find a greater niche than in the emerging critique of the existing spatial configuration of regionalism in mainland Southeastern Asia. The Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze rivers spread out like a necklace around Yunnan and cut across parts of the territories that are known as South, Southeast and East Asia. Each of these rivers has a different topography and fluvial itinerary, giving rise to different political, economic and cultural trajectories. Yet these rivers together form a connected "water-world". These rivers engendered conversations between multi-agentive mobility and large-scale place-making and were at the heart of inter-Asian engagements and integration until the formal end of the European empires. Being both a subject and a sponsor of transregional crossings, the paper argues, these rivers point to the need for a new historical approach that registers the connections between parts of the Southeast Asian massif through to the expansive plain land and the * Associate Professor, History and International Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, iftekhar.iqbal@ubd.edu.bn

Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy and anti-stateism, is not an emic conceptualization, not a particular place or an incantation of a collective identity referred to or professed by particular populations of humans. As a spatial and social reality, or as a word-concept, Zomia, then appears an exercise in scholarly magical realism (evidence is ‘thin’, ‘limited’, and ‘ambiguous’, as Victor Lieberman (2010: 339) puts it more discreetly). It is a form of geographical and historical imagination that nevertheless has begun to ‘escape’ the narrow corridors of the academy and into public discourse where it now lives a life of its own. It is an original imagination no doubt – an optic that stimulates fresh scholarship – but one simultaneously cannot escape that Zomia-disciples are letting their imagination run away with them.

The causes of China's persistent regional inequality have been much debated, with scholars positing geo-climactic, institutionalist, human capital and ethno-cultural explanations. I contribute to this debate by examining the contours of China's spatial inequality at a granular level using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data. I estimate spatial Gini coefficients for nighttime lights emissions across five different levels of spatial aggregation: provinces, counties, a 2.5 by 2.5 decimal degree grid, traditional ethnic homelands and perturbed ethnic homelands (which retain the centroid of traditional homelands but have altered borders). Across multiple specifications and 21 years of nighttime lights data, I find inequality is highest at the traditional ethnic homeland level. Subsequent analyses show that inequality in precipitation levels and the caloric suitability of land are also highest at the ethnic homeland level, suggesting that ethnic inequality reflects in part systematic differences in the quality of agricultural land across the traditional homelands of Han and non-Han ethnicities.

This article offers an alternative perspective of the socio-economic, linguistic and political organization of the tribal communities in Arunachal Pradesh. It tries to break the ethnocentric bias and details the evolution of culture, languages, economic activities, and ways of life as a strategic tactics to keep 'state' at bay. The political construct of Arunachal Pradesh as underdeveloped or uncivilized is inaccurate. The region should be rather viewed as a resistance and rejection to the domination of state.

The research investigates the changing face of state-non state conflict in the post accord era Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. The research aims to refocus the discussion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts from one of state-insurgent relations to one of ethnic competition and division in Bangladesh's contested eastern periphery.

"China’s 4,000 Namuyi (Namuzi) Tibetans live in Mianning, Muli, Yanyuan, and Jiulong counties and Xichang City of Sichuan Province (Lewis 2009), primarily in the Yalong River (locally called the An’ning River) basin and tributary valleys as the river bends between Mianning and Xichang (see Map). Classified as Tibetan, the Namuyi speak a Qiangic language. Previous work on the Namuyi (see contributions by Libu Lakhi et al. in References) provides detailed information on language and culture, which we do not summarize here.
    We focus on Libu Lakhi’s (b. 1981) initial encounters with electricity during the time he lived in Dashui Village, Minsheng Township, Xichang City, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, in terms of electricity’s arrival in the village, lighting, milling, electricity generation, a cassette tape player recorder, and telephone. Electricity has brought extreme and irrevocable change to villagers’ life. Libu Lakhi’s lived experiences resonate with many younger people in China who experienced life prior to the arrival of electricity, and are therefore provided as representative of a much broader social and historical experience that took place after the implementation of China’s Reform and Opening (1978) and Develop the West policies (2000). Libu Lakhi’s accounts also provide a window on a sensory world and aesthetic experience that are now gone forever."

Scholars, with the exception and vision of a few such as Jared Diamond and David Christian, do not usually cut such a huge swathe of territory and time as James C. Scott does in The Art of Not Being Governed. The present book though represents the latest installment of a series of studies by Scott that speak at least at some level to anyone interested in the relationship that society has with the state. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, although he admits that research for the current volume has rendered him a historian in a sense. Certainly, his ideas and conclusions are as relevant to historians as much as to anyone else.
Histories with lens wrought wide are popular both because they are accessible and because they are relevant. Anyone who reads this volume will find themselves frequently pausing to reflect on their own society and their relationship with state institutions. This is, in a more limited sense of the term grand history, although it is mainly limited to the historical period. It follows that there is little attention to individuals (King Bodaw-hpaya of Burma is one among several exceptions)– one will find few personalities here. The focus here is one huge generalizations, some of which will surely evaporate upon close scrutiny, but many that are truly – if not absolutely convincing – thought provoking. Scott admits as much in the introduction but argues that even if some of his assumptions are wrong, the basic ideas he has offered, he is convinced, will hold to be true.
In seeking to escape the state’s stamp on history and on the register by which we interpret (and have interpreted) the world around us, Scott is unable to escape it himself in his analysis. This is, after all, not a history outside of the state but, as Scott has aptly subtitled his book, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The state as leviathan captures free, mobile populations, and makes them sedentary, controllable, and taxable and the survivors, those not dragged heel before head by state administrators and armies, have sought refuge in topographies ever more distant from and difficult to the state, until we arrive at the last major remaining bastion of non-state space, the Southeast Asian massif (elsewhere more broadly defined by Willem van Schendel as Zomia).
It follows from such a broad handling of societies, states, and geography, on such a large terrestrial canvass that the reading has been relatively broad. One cannot, perhaps, hold one seeking to write an anarchist history to the task of dealing substantially with the general literature focused on the lowland states whose reach Scott’s highland refugees have thus far skirted. There are weighty volumes of documentation of highland groups that raided the lowlands for people and things and dragged both up into the hills despite the best efforts of lowland states to secure their frontiers. For Scott, this story is an illusion, the product of state-centred historical narratives to use Prasenjit Duara’s (a scholar who is clearly influential here) terminology or “standard civilisational narrative” to use Scott’s, that obscures and warps the story of people versus the state. That narrative, Scott argues, ignores two chief facts—many (and perhaps most) people in early states were only there “under duress” and that state subjects frequently ran away.
In the untold (until now) story, nearly all people lived outside of the early states (classical Greece or Republican Rome, for example). States were mere blips on the map whose existence would have been indiscernible to the untrained eye a millennium ago: “To an eye not yet hypnotized by archaeological remains and state-centric histories, the landscape would have seemed virtually all periphery and no centers” (5). For the last thousand years and more, state administrations in Southeast Asia have steadily expanded, displacing non-state spaces with state spaces, close on the heels of fleeing populations that wanted to escape control by the state. In this view, what we have thus far seen as lowland political centres securing their frontiers was everywhere really simply an act of enclosure, an attempt not to keep out, but to cement in place, mobile populations. For Scott, then, populations in the highlands are not tribal groupings that push into the lowlands, but aggregates of centuries of escapees who seek and find a new life (and form together with others new ethnic cultures) on the frontiers of lowland states, the Cossacks on the edges of the Russian steppes being a good example (260-261). 
Scott turns around the discussion of the cultural, ethnic, religious, and social legacy of state formation processes in Southeast Asia (most recently examined elsewhere at length by Victor Lieberman) by suggesting that many of those features of Southeast Asian highland groups that have been viewed as original and barbaric, from the perspective of lowland civilizations, can instead be seen as a reaction to the threat of state expansion and the state-making processes that are brought with it. As Scott asserts, “Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples … far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on a long view as political adaptations of non-state peoples to a world of states…” (9).
Some of his assertions will certainly, as Scott himself admits, invite controversy. Perhaps the best example, discussed at length by Scott, is his view of orality over literacy as a choice for a society, ensuring for a highly mobile society greater intellectual flexibility than is possible with (permanent and orthodoxy-buttressing) written documentation in rendering histories and constructing genealogies. Less convincing are Scott’s views on the relationship between religious orthodoxy/heterodoxy and upland/lowland distinctions, which is much more complicated and the areas of context located differently (relationally to the center of power) than suggested here.
This is overall an erudite book and one that will be relevant and important to anyone working on state and society in Southeast Asia, lowland and highland, premodern and modern. Its importance is not so much in its conclusions, but in the intellectual stimulation of reading the thoughts of an insightful man on a topic not often dealt with at this scale and level of analysis. The prose is so clear and unfettered with the usual social science jargon -- Scott is very self-aware as writer, includes myriad anecdotes, and makes frequent use of contractions -- the mesmerized reader has no choice but to lay down their guard. One has thus to avoid the temptation of replacing too quickly and without sufficient consideration one paradigm with another, however well crafted, once convinced by the latter’s internal logic. We are not at the end of the road here with this topic, but still at the beginning. Certainly, both the lay and the academic reader will find an intellectual engagement with the present volume immensely rewarding.